Christopher Columbus Essay | Columbus: Progress Creates Genocide

Columbus: Progress Creates Genocide

Summary: Discusses how Columbus' discovery of America led to the genocide of native Americans. Questions if the resulting progress justified the cultural extermination.

Throughout history, the efforts external forces brought into a land native to another created problems and havoc. These external forces brought in their new ways and ideas to create or establish some kind of connection with the natives. Their establishment of this connection ultimately led to complete havoc and "tear shear" for the natives. For the natives didn't want anything in return but these external forces to leave. While innocently these external forces were creating "human progress," it was a different story for the natives. Human progress, as people know of through history, only created genocide of humankind. One example of this human progress creating mass genocide was the voyage and "discovery" of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.

Christopher Columbus sailed the sea blue in 1492, and he made it to what he thought was Asia in hope to find gold and spices. These hopes led Columbus to a ferocious life of greed, cruelty, and savageness. When he landed off the coast of today's Bahamas, he met the Arawaks. This Indian tribe helped him in every way they could, never raising a sword to the Europeans. However, when these Indians feel short of Columbus's demands, they were slaughtered, imprisoned, or brutally severed for life. No matter how bad the situation the natives could not hide for the Spaniards. "Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead. (A People's History of United States, 5)" This quote goes to show that because of Columbus's regards to creating "human progress", by mining gold and forceful labor, he created a destruction of a complex cultural history where relations worked on equal levels of manner.

Many historians disregard the fact about the natives receiving the underlying work from these external forces. They look at these external forces as heroes for such great establishments. This gives people looking to historians for fact some sense of falsehood that though these external forces may have came up with some type of idea for these establishments but they never did the arduous work behind it all. These establishments truly may have brought seconds of wonder but it took years of pain, whipping, and suffering by innocent humans.